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Authorial alibis :Early modern women's writing and the limits of literature

Record Type:	Electronic resources : Monograph/item
Title/Author:	Authorial alibis :
Reminder of title:	Early modern women's writing and the limits of literature
Author:	Pender, Patricia.
Description:	268 p.
Notes:	Adviser: Stephen Orgel.
Notes:	Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 65-04, Section: A, page: 1382.
Contained By:	Dissertation Abstracts International65-04A.
Subject:	Literature, English.
Online resource:	http://pqdd.sinica.edu.tw/twdaoapp/servlet/advanced?query=3128453
ISBN:	0496757156

Authorial alibis :Early modern women's writing and the limits of literature
Pender, Patricia.

Authorial alibis :Early modern women's writing and the limits of literature [electronic resource] - 268 p.

Adviser: Stephen Orgel.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Stanford University, 2004.

This dissertation examines two distinct forms of "authorial alibi": the modesty tropes through which early modern women writers disavowed the role of author, and the critical assumptions through which literary scholarship denies them authorial status. I ask why the most celebrated moments in the early history of women's writing are declarations of inadequacy, apology, and self-abnegation ("I am not an author, this is not literature"), and why we have regularly reproduced such judgments in our critical recovery of their work ("Mary Sidney is not really an 'author,' she's merely an editor, translator, or patron"). As studies of the ubiquitous humility topoi employed by canonical authors have established, the poetry of praise and the rhetoric of subjection are elaborately overcoded discourses in the early modern period. I argue that by reading early modern women's authorial alibis literally we have employed an untenable double standard: one that imposes an anachronistic uniformity on women's rhetorical self-fashioning and that precipitates their location at the "limits of literature." Unpacking the gendered preconceptions we bring to the study of early modern texts, my dissertation demonstrates how revisionist rhetorical readings of women's works will help to expand prevailing paradigms of early modern authorship and conventional narratives of English literary history.

ISBN: 0496757156Subjects--Topical Terms:

212435
Literature, English.

Authorial alibis :Early modern women's writing and the limits of literature
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520 # $a This dissertation examines two distinct forms of "authorial alibi": the modesty tropes through which early modern women writers disavowed the role of author, and the critical assumptions through which literary scholarship denies them authorial status. I ask why the most celebrated moments in the early history of women's writing are declarations of inadequacy, apology, and self-abnegation ("I am not an author, this is not literature"), and why we have regularly reproduced such judgments in our critical recovery of their work ("Mary Sidney is not really an 'author,' she's merely an editor, translator, or patron"). As studies of the ubiquitous humility topoi employed by canonical authors have established, the poetry of praise and the rhetoric of subjection are elaborately overcoded discourses in the early modern period. I argue that by reading early modern women's authorial alibis literally we have employed an untenable double standard: one that imposes an anachronistic uniformity on women's rhetorical self-fashioning and that precipitates their location at the "limits of literature." Unpacking the gendered preconceptions we bring to the study of early modern texts, my dissertation demonstrates how revisionist rhetorical readings of women's works will help to expand prevailing paradigms of early modern authorship and conventional narratives of English literary history.
520 # $a Throughout this project, I point to the ways that the figure of the woman writer and the category of gender continue to hold crucial, determining, and fetishized positions in our prevailing models of literary history. In doing so, I attend to disparities between the models of gendered authorship employed by early modern women themselves, and the models of gendered authorship we have deployed in criticism devoted to them. Interrogating such rifts illuminates the complex work of gender in our practices of literary classification, alerting us to the ways in which our critical vocabularies are selected and sustained. Rereading early modern women's "authorial alibis" ultimately holds important implications for literary scholarship more broadly, revealing not only richer readings of women's work, but a more nuanced history of early literary culture, and a reflexive critique of our discipline's strategies of demarcation and definition.
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